Previously glider aircraft have been towed aloft and then released to fly off on their own and catapults have been used to rapidly accelerate an aircraft up to flying speed in a short distance. Also aircraft have been fitted with tail hooks or other apparatus to try to engage arresting cables or have been flown into nets in order to arrest their forward movement in a short distance.
Prior art U.S. Pat. No. 4,753,400 (Reuter, et al.) comes closest to one of the preferred embodiments of the proposed invention. However this prior art discloses a very complicated system with a launching parachute and parachute retainer that gets jettisoned for each recovery cycle which in turn launches a ram-air parachute which holds up a ribbon parachute which acts to capture the UAV. A ship mounted stanchion, net and rotating cradle is then required to disentangle the UAV from the ribbon parachute. In this prior art the UAV engaged the ribbon parachute just below the supporting ram-air parachute with very little arrestment distance and thus very high loads. In this prior art the UAV approaches in the turbulent, blocked flow from the ribbon parachute and the ribbon parachute also causes a very large amount of unnecessary drag for the system.
There is also another problem with this prior art. Not only is there no apparent mechanism for retaining the UAV after it impacts the ribbon parachute but it would appear that the UAV would tend to bounce off and tend to drop from the ribbon parachute. Current state-of-the-art UAV launch and arrestment systems are bulky and difficult to integrate onto smaller ships and are time-consuming to operate, erect and tear down. In addition the recovery is very sensitive to sea states and ship motion and very often results in damage to the UAV and arrestment system. The recovery also requires significant piloting skills since the UAV must hit the center of the arrestment net in close proximity to the water, ship structure and personnel while traveling at relatively high speeds through the turbulent air wake from the ship.